While the Supreme Court delivered many 5-4 decisions last term that dealt blows to women’s rights, the environment, and minority rights, perhaps no decision was more stunningly illogical than that of Ledbetter v Goodyear. Lilly Ledbetter was a manager at a Goodyear Tire plant in Alabama who received smaller pay raises than her male co-workers. After 19 years of discriminatory pay practices, Lebetter was making 15-25% less than her male co-workers — even those with far less experience. In 1999, Ledbetter sued Goodyear for violating Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which allows employees to file suit within 180 days after their employer commits an act of racial or sexual discrimination.

In Ledbetter v Goodyear, the Supreme Court decided that employees may sue employers “within 180 days of the original discriminatory action — not within 180 days of their last paycheck.” However, employees may not even know about the pay discrimination until long after the first discriminatory paycheck is cut. The Supreme Court’s ruling means that if a woman learns 181 days after her first paycheck that she is being paid less than a male co-worker, she cannot sue her employer.

In order to remedy this situation, the House passed the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which treats “each and every discriminatory paycheck as a new discrimination, thus re-starting the 180-day clock” after every paycheck. The Senate version of this bill, the Fair Pay Restoration Act, will be coming to a vote later this month.

Please contact your Senator and tell him or her that you support equal pay for women!

Equal pay for men and women still has a long way to go; women are paid 77 cents for every dollar a man is paid. The Fair Pay Restoration Act will give women the tools they need to get the money that they deserve.

The New York Times reports, “Saying it had the right to block ‘controversial or unsavory’ text messages, Verizon Wireless has rejected a request from Naral Pro-Choice America, the abortion rights group, to make Verizon’s mobile network available for a text-message program.”

Verizon told Naral that it reserves the right to bar any group “that seeks to promote an agenda or distribute content that, in its discretion, may be seen as controversial or unsavory to any of our users.”

A Naral spokesman argues, “No company should be allowed to censor the message we want to send to people who have asked us to send it to them.”

McLatchy is reporting that Ohio and Florida, two swing states, have passed statutes that “could facilitate a controversial Republican tactic known as vote caging, ” which will allow Republicans to “impede Democratic-leaning minorities from voting in 2008.”

Caging, used in the past to target poor minorities in heavily Democratic precincts, entails sending mass mailings to certain voters and then using the undelivered letters to compile lists of voters for eligibility challenges. As the high-stakes ground war escalates heading into next year’s elections, Republicans have led the charge for an array of revisions to state voting rights laws, especially in key battleground states. Republican political appointees in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division have endorsed some of these measures.

UPDATE: In 2004, the Republicans prevented “more than 350,000 voters in Ohio from casting ballots or having their votes counted.”

Last spring Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Peter Pace called homosexuality “immoral,” arguing that “the military should ‘not tolerate’ homosexuality just as it rejects ‘military members who sleep with other military members’ wives.”

Today he reaffirmed his belief that homosexuality is immoral and said that the United States should not “condone activity that, in my upbringing, is counter to God’s law.” Pace added:

“I would be very willing and able and supportive” to changes to the policy “to continue to allow the homosexual community to contribute to the nation without condoning what I believe to be activity — whether it to be heterosexual or homosexual — that in my upbringing is not right.”

ThinkProgress has video.

According to a transcript published Wednesday of a conversation between President Bush and former Spanish prime minister Jose Maria Aznar, “Bush tells Aznar that nations like Mexico, Angola, Chile and Cameroon must know that the security of the United States is at stake. He says during the meeting on his ranch in Texas that Angola stood to lose financial aid while Chile could see a free trade agreement held up in the US Senate if they did not back the resolution.”

The Washington Post’s Capitol Briefing recently investigated Sen. Larry Craig’s (R-ID) version of the events leading to his arrest. The Post notes, “Craig usually passed by four other restrooms on his way to the North Star Crossing restroom,” where he has said he regularly stops when he flies to Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, “including one sitting right at the gates he usually arrived at, literally a hundred or so feet from the gate.” The Post also notes that Craig’s explanation for pleading guilty - that he was “anxious” about missing his flight - is “completely implausible.”

“By a vote 76-22, the Senate passed the Lieberman-Kyl amendment, which threatens to “combat, contain and [stop]” Iran via “military instruments.” Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA) called the amendment “Cheney’s fondest pipe dream” and said it could “read as a backdoor method of gaining Congressional validation for military action.”

Yesterday, The Body Politik noted that the media controversy surrounding Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s address at Columbia University bolstered the stature of the “increasingly isolated” Iranian leader and empowered American war hawks itching for war with Iran.

ThinkProgress has more.

UPDATE I: Presidential candidate Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) voted for the amendment. She has previously stated that “if the Administration believes that any, any use of force against Iran is necessary, the President must come to Congress to seek that authority.” But according to Webb, this amendment, which Hillary supported, may be all the authority the president needs.

UPDATE II: ThinkProgress notes that “Fox News network is now in full drumbeat mode, trying to promote a war against Iran.”

The editors of BodyPolitik clarify an earlier post about Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s speech at Columbia University.

To paraphrase Columbia University President Lee Bollinger, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a brutal, “petty[,] and cruel dictator.” He routinely denies the Holocaust took place, has “called for the destruction of the state of Israel,” provides aid to terrorists, treats women abominably, and executes teenaged homosexuals. We think it is fair to say that Ahmadinejad is a scourge of humanity.

Yet, we think Columbia University was right to invite Ahmadinejad, not because of any of his own qualities, but for two other overarching reasons.

First, preventing Ahmadinejad from speaking only enhances his stature. As NPR notes, this type of condemnation “may be just what the Iranian president needs to shore up a shaky political position at home.” Yet, allowed to speak, Ahmadinejad “elicited laughter and boos from the audience” of Columbia students, and quickly illustrated the emptiness of his rhetoric of benevolence and peace. This demonstrates that Americans should not fear losing a public relations war with a dictator who publicly proclaims his horrible acts frequently and with pride. We believe Americans, like the Columbia students in the audience, are fully capable of listening to such a figure and dismissing him on their own - without college presidents or politicians telling them how and what to think. As Bollinger noted, Ahmadinejad’s speech “is consistent with the idea that one should know thine enemies, to have the intellectual and emotional courage to confront the mind of evil and to prepare ourselves to act with the right temperament.”

Second, Ahmadinejad’s speech sparked an intense, in-depth dialogue on the meaning of free speech and liberty on college campuses and across the nation. Countless news outlets and pundits debated the virtues and drawbacks of Columbia hosting such a figure, as did many college newspapers. In fact, on our own campuses of William and Mary and the University of Pennsylvania, we observed more passion and activism on this particular issue than on the 2008 election, the genocide in Darfur, and even the war in Iraq. We ask, what better way to demonstrate the superiority of liberty and freedom to a violent, repressive figure than to show him that his appearance will not only fail to win converts to his side, but will actually strengthen the very civil society that allows him to speak?

-Jordan Grossman and Ryan Powers, Editors, The Body Politik

UPDATE: Over at AlterNet, two Columbia students argue that “Columbia’s invitation to Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad not only shows the world the importance of free speech, but also demonstrates what free speech means. ”

Those who oppose Ahmadinejad’s visit to Columbia argue that we are giving him a soapbox. Ahmadinejad is clearly not challenged for venues in which he can promote his twisted ideology. His ability to spread his heinous views is evidenced by the fact that Americans are well aware of these positions. If we didn’t let him speak here, he could just as easily spread hate from Iran. The difference in bringing him to Columbia is that we will have the opportunity to challenge his claims, whereas we can only cringe when he speaks from Iran. What Columbia has chosen to do is to put him in a context where he cannot take advantage of the bully pulpit, where he must defend his actions to students and academics, where, for once, he is in a conversation rather than a monologue.

After 11 Iraqis were shot dead last Sunday, The Body Politik has noted that the State Department repeatedly ignored Iraqi requests to regulate Blackwater, extending impunity to a GOP-friendly contractor.

Blackwater founder “[Erik] Prince has been a steady contributor to the Republican National Committee, giving more than $200,000 since 1998. He also has supported various conservative candidates, including President Bush, Sens. Tom Coburn (R-OK) and Rick Santorum (R-PA), Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA), and indicted former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-TX).”

Yesterday, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, accused the State Department of obstructing an investigation into the company’s actions in Iraq.

Blackwater has informed the committee that a State Department official directed Blackwater not to provide documents relevant to the committee’s investigation into the company’s activities in Iraq without the prior written approval of the State Department.

Given the President’s penchant for politicizing federal agencies, the State Department’s efforts to shield a Republican political ally may be egregious, but they’re certainly not surprising.

“‘This is a big mess that I don’t think anyone has their hands around yet,’ said another U.S. military official. ‘It’s not necessarily a bad thing these guys are being held accountable. Iraqis hate them, the troops don’t particularly care for them, and they tend to have a know-it-all attitude, which means they rarely listen to anyone — even the folks that patrol the ground on a daily basis.’ …

‘They are immature shooters and have very quick trigger fingers. Their tendency is shoot first and ask questions later,’ said an Army lieutenant colonel serving in Iraq. Referring to the Sept. 16 shootings, the officer added, ‘None of us believe they were engaged, but we are all carrying their black eyes.’”

UPDATE: A new report “finds that Blackwater and other private security firms in Iraq are detrimental to U.S. counterinsurgency efforts.” TPMuckracker has more.